...and my personal favorite from a few days ago, a study of Republicans by psychology professor at the University of Virginia, written for liberals who grapple with why others make such different choices.

What Makes People Vote Republican - Jonathan Haidt. "(M)orality is
not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is
also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions,
and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the "it" to which they refer. " http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html

The markets are crashing. You might be feeling anxious, worried about how you going to weather this financial crisis, what you should *do* (or not??) to protect you and your family.

I will tell you.

If you build an airplane out of legos, and the airplane comes apart -- well it is very disappointing, you might feel crushed if you've worked very hard on it -- but you can still build a
new airplane because you still have the legos. Sure, it's not
an airplane until it's assembled, but the legos themselves are intact. When the airplane falls apart, it's time to make sure we don't lose any of the legos. We can even gather more legos,
get them organized, and start snapping those guys together for the rebuild.

That's what intangible assets are: the legos.

Those are not only the aspects of life that we truly can't do without,
those are the blocks from which productivity is built and risk is
managed. Examples of intangible assets are social relationships, trust, teamwork, knowledge, health, environmental resilience... the list goes on. Take stock of those things. Treasure them and build upon them.

And the economy will recover, because those building blocks, like legos, are still here in a very real way.

So, do this:

Build
social assets: Build positive relationships. Reconnect with people you genuinely enjoy spending time with. Reach out to new people. Help others who don't have much to rebuild with. Help the elderly who won't have time to wait out.
Protect your friendships. Have the courage to maintain a positive outlook during a time of misfortune. Don't argue, turn on each other, or let fear
or panic guide your behavior.

Build knowledge assets: While listening to other people, learn a little. Read what other people have to say; imagine things from their perspective. Of course, it's always a good idea to learn new things, just like it's always a good idea to behave honorably.

Build physical assets: Maintain health, both physical and emotional. Get whatever it is taken care of. Keep your sick kids home until they're no longer contagious. Make choices that benefit environmental health.

Build spiritual assets: Enjoy the arts: music, reading, whatever you prefer. Enjoy nature. Become grounded and connected with the teachings of the religion of your choice.

You may think, "Lovely. But what the heck am I supposed to do with what remains of my money?"

The answer is to do the same thing. Invest in building blocks. Will the financial ROI be good? Will it even be positive? That, I don't know, and even for successful investments it will depend on the time frame. But I do know this: If you are going to invest, carefully investing in areas that will benefit the ability of the world to solve problems and be productive will build the ability for the economy to recover.

Specifically:

Invest in technologies centered not only on energy production and efficiency, but on sensor and separations technologies (like filtration).

Invest in approaches that facilitate community cohesion, problem-solving, and the formation of partnerships and groups.

Like many people, I'm trying to distract myself from the unfolding horror story. But like many people, I've been unsuccessful.

While I think money is the bee's knees, being fungible and countable, and allegedly encouraging objectivity over cronyism, the fact is... we all know this system is not only broken - it's nonsensical.

What if everything had to have a financial transaction associated with it in order to determine its value? How does a mother take care of her new baby? If a young mother dies? If a father becomes injured? What happens when someone has no remaining family to care for them and they just get old? Wait - who cleans the house? Does purchasing? Cooks dinner? Obviously, unless you're wealthy enough to actually hire servants for all these chores, there is a lot of off-balance-sheet productivity in any family. This has been said... old news, right?

But here's the elephant: we've created an economic system that excludes the labor that's required to survive! There's a whole volunteer market... but it isn't tracked, at all.

So here's the good news: we still have assets. Tons of 'em.

And what's really interesting particularly in Europe and the United States is that we keep building them - maybe even more and faster in an "economic downturn"; in fact there's a huge effort of open source that is is just another form of volunteerism.

For those who are unaware, open source means people work on developing software, for free. Why? For the same reasons
people do other volunteer work: to help build their own reputation as a good person who pitches in, because they feel
spiritually fulfilled doing so, to have a structured opportunity to learn something new... sometimes even for their own mental health if they need a distraction and to feel more connected to other people.

Yet it's important to keep in mind that these are all things that contribute, eventually, to any commercial product:
reputation, knowledge, and an ability to connect with people who need
things. Whether we do that at home or through volunteer organizations
or open source movements is irrelevant - that's where the precursors to
capital are created.

So it's not that we need regulatory oversight or socialism - it's far more than that. We need a way
to measure these precursors. We need an entire social system that's focused on
building the precursors to creativity, which are the precursors to productivity.

It's also necessary to monitor what the yield is: what if we have a lot of
creative people around but nothing is created? There's something wrong.
But we need both sides: how much should we expect to be created, and
how much has actually been produced.

So the first point I'm making here: The open source movement plus volunteerism is the proto-economy; the
one where these precursors are constructed out of thin air. So long as that economy is healthy, there is underlying reason to hope. We can focus on how well we think we'll convert our intangible assets to tangible ones.

The second point: How do we
make this proto-economy efficient? And how do we
keep people volunteering for a little bit longer? At Mobilize, I was introduced to a gigaom startup, OStatic, that had an interesting mechanism for
facilitating solutions to both these issues in the open source space -- again, just a subset of volunteerism as a whole.

OStatic organizes open source output and creates mechanisms by which competitive solutions can be evaluated. Meanwhile, it addresses the second issue -- creating some financial return (fungibility of cash can't be dismissed!) -- to help volunteers be able to find the time to continue volunteering. The mechanism is simple and exists elsewhere: allow people to put some of their purchases towards open source projects.

Now. Think for a moment, let's blow this up: what if the way one section of the economy worked was that people volunteered time in various un-profitable pursuits, and in order to compensate them, we designated some of our money directly to those services? It's like sales tax, except instead of going to governments it goes to a market for volunteer labor.

I can see positives there, I can see negatives there, but one thing I definitely see is a mechanism for accounting for at least some types of volunteer labor. Can you see others?

A quick post on an event tonight that raises funding for cancer research via your passive participation.
Like many people, my life has been drastically altered through losing people I love to cancer: my mother and father both died of cancer (1990, 2004 respectively), and my son's other grandmother also (1994). I have had other relatives and friends who have themselves been afflicted by cancer, or have their lives changed by the affliction of others they love.

I was talking to a friend this weekend. He mentioned how broadly
distributed intellectual potential is among the population, and it got me thinking....

When I was a kid, I played games at recess and ran around. I swam butterfly for a year in high school. I played some tennis. A few coaches commented that I have decent hand/eye coordination and was reasonably quick. I was nothing special, either way... unless what I needed to do required both my feet to leave and then to return to the ground! In that case, failure was (and is) a reasonable expectation, and an injury, quite possible. Unless I'm going to be
landing in water at the end, this whole "leaving the earth's surface"
thing is clearly something my brain doesn't process well at all.

I was lucky, since I was a girl - the fact I was eager to play sports successfully offset my comparative lack of height as well as my leaping challenges. But for many boys, Physical Education class was a nightmare of humiliation, where coaches had achievement expectations that the boys just didn't have the inclination to train for and in many cases lacked the physical talent to meet.

Those same boys grew up in many cases to be academically successful men; fathers, who could determine funding priorities and administer school districts. I'm not sure this is related, but my son's academically excellent public school has a Physical Education department whose grading requirements for an A- in 9th and 10th grades are apparently "successfully changes into PE clothes." There is no required physical education at all for 11th and 12th grades. The coaches do care a lot about the teams, but not at all about educating anyone of even average physical talent.

In other words, I suspect that since PE was difficult for people who weren't talented athletically, it was curtailed and then turned into an utterly useless program. Imagine what would happen if we taught math that way? If you're not "math team" caliber, you show up for class, play math-based games if you want to -- hang out and talk to your friends if not -- and then you get an "A-" so long as you don't cause any problems.

I believe we need to create "learning environments" for physical learning in the schools. Teachers ridiculing kids who can't make the quota of pushups isn't okay; but neither is saying "voila! no need for push-ups!" I think understanding how to deal with the wide distribution of physical talent will help academics find innovative new approaches for managing the wide distribution of intellectual talent.

So back to the conversation with my friend, because there's another part to this, centered around the wide disparity in IQ that schools have to deal with, and how that affects the way people approach their lives, particularly how they approach conflict.

I don't actually have any answers to the questions he raised. But I have been thinking a lot about, specifically, the role of public education beyond the education of specific intellectual skills.

I have seen bright children become so competitive that they lose all sense of empathy. I have seen average children become so insecure and anxious they get sick. I have seen children (and adults) become violently angry and destructively frustrated when they just can't "get it," particularly when the pressure's on and the stakes are high.

I believe the future of education has to be team-based, because we can't afford, as a society, to exacerbate impulsive anger in children who aren't succeeding at the moment, whether they're just not smart enough or they're just generally prone to anger or impulsivity, or they are having short term personal crises. Having social support helps people feel calmer, and gives them confidence they'll weather whatever they need to face.

We need to know a lot more about how to integrate people who are experiencing failure, anger, and obsession. We have an idea of how to create an intellectual learning environment: it's okay to try, mistakes are tolerated, unpacked, and knowledge is gained. Now we need to learn how to create learning environments that accommodate emotional learning.

And we have to expand those domains to encompass a way to differentiate the curriculum for a very wide disparity in natural talent.